Ghostscript 9.05 makes headway with color managed workflow

Alexandre Prokoudine 10. Feb, 2012
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Artifex has just made the world a better place by releasing a new version of Ghostscript, an excellent PostScript and PDF interpreter. The newly released v9.05 continues the work on ICC-based color rendering workflow first introduced in v9.00.

First of all, Ghostscript got softproofing via ICC profiles. The new command, -sProofProfile=filename, will effectively render color output as if it was made by an output device characterized by that ICC profile.

The new version doesn't stop at that and adds support for device link ICC profiles. Another new command, -sDeviceLinkProfile=filename, will add the device link profile to the end of the link transform from source to destination.

As if it wasn't quite sufficient, Ghostcript 9.05 is now able to embed ICC profiles to TIFF, JPEG and PNG files created by respective virtual devices. It also supports a new "make sure you understand what you're doing" mode activated by the -dUseFastColor toggle. This mode does unmanaged color transformations for source DeviceXXX colors. This is beneficial in uses where performance takes precedence over ultimate color fidelity.

The last significant color related change is a new dummy device called inkcov device that produces output listing the percentage of pixels containing C, M, Y, and K ink.

Ghostscript 9.05 also comes with few changes regarding fonts: the PDF interpreter can now use DroidSansFallback TrueType font to automatically substitute for missing CIDFonts, and the selection of font that Ghostscript ships has been changed to the standard 35 Postscript-compatible fonts distributed by URW.

The new version also ships modified version of OpenJPEG instead of Jasper and features output quality and stability improvements. As usual, the downloading options are: